Poems

Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100

for the 43 members of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 100, working at the Windows on the World restaurant, who lost their lives in the attack on the World Trade Center

Alabanza. Praise the cook with the shaven head
and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye,
a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo,
the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle
glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook's yellow Pirates cap
worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane
that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua,
for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked
even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish
rose before bread. Praise the bread. Alabanza.
Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up,
like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium.
Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen
could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations:Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana,
Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning,
where the gas burned blue on every stove
and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers,
hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs
or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy's music, the chime-chime
of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher
who worked that morning because another dishwasher
could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime
to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family
floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen
and sang to herself about a man gone. Alabanza.
After the thunder wilder than thunder,
after the booming ice storm of glass from the great windows,
after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs,
after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen,
for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo,
like a cook's soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us
about the bristles of God's beard because God has no face,
soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations
across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza I say, even if God has no face.
Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan to Kabul
two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other,
mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
And the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, essayist, editor and translator, including his most recently published poetry collection, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (W. W. Norton, 2016). He is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst.

More by Martín Espada

In the republic of poetry,a train full of poetsrolls south in the rainas plum trees rockand horses kick the air,and village bandsparade down the aislewith trumpets, with bowler hats,followed by the presidentof the republic,shaking every hand.

In the republic of poetry,monks print verses about the nighton boxes of monastery chocolate,kitchens in restaurantsuse odes for recipesfrom eel to artichoke,and poets eat for free.

In the republic of poetry,poets read to the baboonsat the zoo, and all the primates,poets and baboons alike, scream for joy.

In the republic of poetry,poets rent a helicopterto bombard the national palacewith poems on bookmarks,and everyone in the courtyardrushes to grab a poemfluttering from the sky,blinded by weeping.

In the republic of poetry,the guard at the airportwill not allow you to leave the countryuntil you declaim a poem for herand she says Ah! Beautiful.

Not songs of loyalty alone are these,But songs of insurrection also,For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world over. —Walt Whitman

I see the dark-skinned bodies falling in the street as their ancestors fellbefore the whip and steel, the last blood pooling, the last breath spitting.I see the immigrant street vendor flashing his wallet to the cops,shot so many times there are bullet holes in the soles of his feet.I see the deaf woodcarver and his pocketknife, crossing the streetin front of a cop who yells, then fires. I see the drug raid, the wrongdoor kicked in, the minister's heart seizing up. I see the man hawkinga fistful of cigarettes, the cop’s chokehold that makes his wheezinglungs stop wheezing forever. I am in the crowd, at the window,kneeling beside the body left on the asphalt for hours, covered in a sheet.

I see the suicides: the conga player handcuffed for drumming on the subway,hanged in the jail cell with his hands cuffed behind him; the suspect leakingblood from his chest in the backseat of the squad card; the 300-pound boysaid to stampede bare-handed into the bullets drilling his forehead.

I see the coroner nodding, the words he types in his report burrowinginto the skin like more bullets. I see the government investigations stacking,words buzzing on the page, then suffocated as bees suffocate in a jar. I seethe next Black man, fleeing as the fugitive slave once fled the slave-catcher,shot in the back for a broken tail-light. I see the cop handcuff the corpse.

I see the rebels marching, hands upraised before the riot squads,faces in bandannas against the tear gas, and I walk beside them unseen.I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unbornwill read or hear a century from now, words that make them wonderhow we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slavesstill fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them, how we awokeevery morning without the blood of the dead sweating from every pore.

For the community of Newtown, Connecticut, where twenty students and six educators lost their lives to a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School, December 14, 2012

Now the bells speak with their tongues of bronze.
Now the bells open their mouths of bronze to say:
Listen to the bells a world away. Listen to the bell in the ruins
of a city where children gathered copper shells like beach glass,
and the copper boiled in the foundry, and the bell born
in the foundry says: I was born of bullets, but now I sing
of a world where bullets melt into bells. Listen to the bell
in a city where cannons from the armies of the Great War
sank into molten metal bubbling like a vat of chocolate,
and the many mouths that once spoke the tongue of smoke
form the one mouth of a bell that says: I was born of cannons,
but now I sing of a world where cannons melt into bells.
Listen to the bells in a town with a flagpole on Main Street,
a rooster weathervane keeping watch atop the Meeting House,
the congregation gathering to sing in times of great silence.
Here the bells rock their heads of bronze as if to say:
Melt the bullets into bells, melt the bullets into bells.
Here the bells raise their heavy heads as if to say:
Melt the cannons into bells, melt the cannons into bells.
Here the bells sing of a world where weapons crumble deep
in the earth, and no one remembers where they were buried.
Now the bells pass the word at midnight in the ancient languageof bronze, from bell to bell, like ships smuggling news of liberation
from island to island, the song rippling through the clouds.
Now the bells chime like the muscle beating in every chest,
heal the cracks in the bell of every face listening to the bells.
The chimes heal the cracks in the bell of the moon.
The chimes heal the cracks in the bell of the world.